News of the Week

In science news around the world this week, a tobacco research project nominated for China's 2012 National Science and Technology Progress Award has produced an uproar among China's scientific community, the head of one of Croatia's most important natural sciences institutes has lost her job, scientists began a massive accounting of seals in the Arctic, a new state-of-the-art U.S. laboratory for agricultural biodefense is in limbo, and publishers of more than 1000 Chinese journals have pledged to root out plagiarism and falsified research.

For the second year in a row, Thomson Reuters named Eric Lander of the Broad Institute the year's most influential researcher. A group of undergraduates at Case Western Reserve University designed a non-Newtonian fluid to fill potholes. And this week's numbers quantify the new record for most retractions by a single author and the number of coral species in U.S. waters that likely face extinction by 2100.

This week's Newsmakers are Mohamed Ismail Khaled, the Egyptian official in charge of foreign archaeological missions, who spoke to a Yale University audience about the effects of the revolution, and astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a champion of freedom, human rights, and democracy in China, who died at 76 on 6 April.

Research presented at the ACS meeting suggests that packing RNA strands together to form nano-sized particles could help get them into target cells and that another nanoparticle may lead to novel kinds of vaccines.

At the ACS meeting, a pair of research groups reported that they now have synthetic nucleotides that can be incorporated into DNA and can be copied with near perfection by enzymes that copy natural DNA.

About The Cover

COVER A young polar bear (Ursus maritimus) on a piece of ice that is drifting in the Barents Sea, northeast of Svalbard, Norway. Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, but current melting and retreat of sea ice is increasingly forcing them onto land. A recent study has found polar bears to be evolutionarily older and genetically more distinct than was previously thought. See page 344. Photo: Florian Schulz, www.visionsofthewild.com